A new art project that will (hopefully) depict the negotiations of young love.
Human relationships do not work as a zero-sum game. Let me take a moment to explain. A zero-sum game is where one side wins, which means the other side has to lose. In mathematical terms -1(the loser) + 1(the winner) = 0. So, everyone who plays this game will either go all out to win or they will end up losing completely. Faced with only those two outcomes, the game player is tempted to cheat. Especially if the stakes are potentially life or death. After all, in issues like the national debate over health care, the loser gets to die.
This is, of course, what we have seen played out over the course of the last two weeks in the appointment to the Supreme Court of a radical right judge who was accused by a credible witness of a disqualifying action. It is only a matter of the destruction of a judge’s career versus the defaming of a professional woman who was a teenage victim of attempted rape and sexual assault. It is a very serious zero-sum game set up maliciously in order to achieve political power for the white male ruling elite.
This zero-sum game was won by the grinning evil cartoon mutant man-turtle over the minions of Mad-Looker Booker and the forces of “being right but never winning”. The consequences are decades worth of malignant conservative rulings like the Citizens United Ruling and rulings about health care that take away things like protections for people like me with pre-existing conditions. Losers get nothing. And eventually, the winners have nothing to show for it because the sum is zero.
The orange-faced Trumpinator was right when he predicted we would soon reach a point when we were tired of so much winning. I am definitely tired of Trumpkins winning all the time, especially when they are so heartless in the way they bully and cheat. The problems with the court would not be so severe if the Republicans hadn’t cheated on Justice Merrick Garland’s nomination and stolen that one from Obama to give to old Pumpkinhead. And when it came time to let the FBI investigate the allegations brought up in the confirmation hearings, they cheated again by forcing the investigators to ignore so many corroborating witnesses. You can’t find proof of something by not looking for the proof. (Of course, they were obviously motivated to NOT find anything.)
The solution comes from the fundamental principles of representative democracy being explained repeatedly on various news outlets by Ohio Governor John Kasich. He has been pointing out that what we really need is bipartisanship in government. All sides need to bargain it out so that everybody wins something and nobody wins everything. Compromise is what the Congress is put in place to create. The Supreme Court solution would have been to rescind the tainted nomination and find a candidate that could be broadly supported by both sides.
But in the current era of ruthless Republicans obliterating and overruling diminishing Democrats, non-toxic bipartisan solutions are not going to happen. The two sides, the Neanderthals and their bonkable warclub targets, will continue to bash away at each other with their warclubs. And the Neanderthals will continue to cheat. And in the long run, everybody loses. The overall sum, after all, is zero.
The worst experience I got from this summer’s food delivery came at the hands of a fellow school teacher. I had to deliver faculty lunch to an elementary school in the last week of summer school classes. It was a large lunch with two bags of burgers and a tray loaded with drinks in flimsy cardboard cups. It was a short drive from the restaurant to the school. But when I got there, it was a school with many entrances and kids playing on two different sides of the building. I went to the door I thought the Uber navigator was directing me to. I knocked. When I got no answer, I called the lady who ordered everything. I told her I was at the west door. She told me that I had to find the main door on the south side of the building. So I managed to juggle the two sacks and the easily spillable drinks to three different doors on the south side, all locked. I called again and was told I must have the wrong building, so I went to the school building across the street and found an office building with only kindergarten and daycare kids present. I called again.
Catch a Falling Star 
Predictions Using Mickey Math
Mickeys are by their nature pessimists. When mostly bad things happen to you in your life, you learn not to expect good things, only be pleasantly surprised by them. And bad things happen only when you are prepared for them if you are expecting only bad things to happen. In fact, the bad outcome will probably seem good in comparison to the terrible thing you were planning on happening to you.
For example, my car is in the shop being fixed for accident damage that prevented me from earning extra money through Uber for a month and a half. I was told on Thursday that the car doors were fixed and it was in the paint shop. It was possible I was going to get it back Friday afternoon. I was not upset or surprised that I never got the call Friday. In fact, I fully expected somebody had dropped the car off a lift or painted it neon puce or something and that it will take another two weeks to fix the new damage. So if it turns out to be ready tomorrow, which I sincerely don’t expect due to Mickey Math, I will still be pleasantly surprised. I might even go into happy shock. After all, I clearly remember one time watching a tow truck operator load my malfunctioning car onto a flatbed tow truck, only to see it roll off the front of the truck to further damage it because he had not properly secured it. That yielded happy shock because the body shop owner who also owned the tow truck ended up repairing my car for free.
What is the science behind Mickey Math, you say? Oh, you didn’t say anything? Well, I will tell you anyway. In a world where 2 + 2 = 4, if Mickey desperately needs the answer to always be at least 4, you can be certain by experimental proof and past experience that it will surely come out as 2 + 2 = 3. Life and physics always disappoint Mickey one way or another. So the science tells Mickey to always be prepared for the worst.
That being said, here are some predictions for the near future figured out via Mickey Math.
Now, it is quite possible that things will fall short of most of these dire predictions, but that is how Mickey Math secures happiness from a miserable life.
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Filed under angry rant, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney, pessimism, self pity